News at Eleven: It's hard to care about a lot

of [Frank] O'Hara's poems, but he doesn't want you to care. To accept the present as a fallen realm risks making it insignificant, although other poets of the period, especially Elizabeth Bishop, wrote deeply without losing their lightness of bearing. In his best poems--"Thinking of James Dean," "Why I Am Not a Painter," "On Seeing Larry Rivers' ‘Washington Crossing the Delaware' at the Museum of Modern Art," "Ode: Salute to the French Negro Poets," "The Day Lady Died," "Les Luths," "Poem (Lana Turner has collapsed!)" and half a dozen others--O'Hara found something beyond that terrible vacancy he was trying so hard to fill.

from The New York Times: Urban Poet

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